Every chapter below is the complete markdown source, rendered for reading: nothing summarised, nothing cut. Animated SVG figures, comparison tables and ASCII board dumps are additions on top of the text. Use the sidebar inside each chapter to jump between sections; the theme and animation controls persist.
Load Balancing
One front door for a hundred servers: forwarding modes, routing algorithms, L4 vs L7, health checks and draining.
Caching Strategies
The latency pyramid, the five read/write patterns, eviction policies, and the three cache killers that take databases down.
Rate Limiting
Five algorithms with their exact trade-offs, distributed counting in Redis, and how to say “no” in a way clients can act on.
Sharding & Partitioning
The only way to scale writes: partitioning strategies, shard-key choice, rebalancing, hot spots and cross-shard pain.
Content Delivery Networks
Beating the speed of light with edges: push vs pull, anycast and GeoDNS routing, TTLs, purging and origin shield.
Consistent Hashing
Why hash % N is a catastrophe, how the ring fixes it, virtual nodes for skew, plus rendezvous and jump hash.
Message Queues & Streaming
Breaking synchronous coupling: queue vs log, Kafka partitions and consumer groups, delivery semantics, DLQs and lag.
Consensus & Replication
Quorums, CAP and PACELC, the three replication models, N/W/R tuning, Raft and the full consistency spectrum.